Charities Aren’t Doing Nearly Enough To Help People
Where does all that money really go?
Let me start this off by saying that I have always been poor. As a kid, I would gag when my parents tried to pass off powdered milk as a reasonable substitute at times when we had no grocery money and had to rely on food pantry handouts. The government cheddar cheese, as I recall, was quite good though. It was a big, dense, bright orange block of salty flavor. Spam I never grew accustomed to.
During these early years, I don’t think I fully understood what it meant to be poor and have to ask for help. I saw what was happening and knew that our food was often received from charities for free, or paid for with food stamps. I remember my mother being on the phone all the time, waiting on hold, yelling at strangers over what I now assume to have been bureaucratic issues. She wasn’t perfect, of course, but this effort was wasting her youth. It’s no wonder she was frustrated. She was a single mom with four kids living about as meager an existence as you can without being on the street.
These days, I find myself wondering how charities are still failing to help people turn their lives around. My family never escaped our cycle of poverty, and that is very much the norm, it being a cycle and all. Why haven’t we figured out how to break these cycles? Charities and other…
